Decision on “Ban on Work from Home!?” At Yahoo! – Impact and Perspectives
“People are more productive when they’re alone, but they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together. Some of the best ideas come from pulling two different ideas together.”
-- Marissa Mayer, CEO, Yahoo Inc.
“To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo, and that starts with physically being together.”
-- Jack Reses, Head HR, Yahoo Inc.
The HR strategies in the global companies are always rigorous, up grading according to the demands of the business, changes in technology and dynamics of work environment. The work from home is one such option which is growing due to emergence of new technology, uneven distribution of talent across the world, strategies to promote women’s involvement in corporate world and cost saving through reduction in the physical work space. Along with the advantages, many issues are associated with the work from home option as the connectivity and feeling of being part of one organization goes missing, it becomes difficult for the managers to keep watch on the productivity and performance of the team member and the good insights and innovative ideas coming from team interaction no more exists........
About the Company
Yahoo Inc. multinational Company is an Internet corporation headquartered at Sunnyvale, California, USA. Jerry Yang and David Filo, the founder members of Yahoo, established the company in January 1994 and and it was incorporated on March 1, 19955. The founder of the company came up with an innovative name for the company called, “Yahoo” which is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”. The word “hierarchical” here means that the arrangement of the database of the Yahoo is in layers and subcategories. “Oracle” represents that the company will act as a “source of truth and wisdom” for the customers. “Officious” indicates that the data base of Yahoo is being used by many office workers while surfing from work...........
Chain of CEO Replacements
Yahoo changed four CEOs in a span of five years i.e., from 2007 to 2012in order to improve the performance and productivity of the company (Exhibit I). In January 2009, the former CEO of Autodesk, Carol Bartz replaced the founder member Jerry Yang as a CEO of Yahoo. Carol Bartz got fired at Yahoo, by the chairman, Roy Bostock after less than three years of her joining, as the stock continued to flat line............
Marissa Mayer at Yahoo (2012-present)
In July, 2012 Mayer joined Yahoo as CEO and became the youngest CEO of the Fortune 500 company. Before joining Yahoo, Mayer was working with Google; she joined Google as an Engineer in 1999 and became the company’s first female engineer. She worked on many prestigious projects in Google such as Google search, Google Maps, Google Product Search and many more. She was the Vice President of Local Maps and Location Services , Google before joining Yahoo as CEO..............
Marissa Mayer’s Decision on ‘Ban on Work from Home’
Yahoo experienced doubled stock price in the market23, soon after Mayer’s inception as its CEO (Exhibit II)............
Mayer’s leadership qualities helped Yahoo to regain trust among the stakeholders. She took many aggressive expansion decisions for Yahoo, for instance, acquiring around 20 companies in the span of one year. IT leaders, especially women, were looking up to her as a role model. In order to support working women in IT industry and to help them to maintain work life balance, she increased the parental leaves to eight weeks and an additional bonus of $500 to new parents at Yahoo............
Discussion
From the point of improving productivity and innovation, many business leaders supported the decision of ban on work from home by Mayer. HP also followed the track and asked some employees to get back to the offices. HP CEO Meg Whitman said, “We recognize that in the past, we may have asked certain employees to work from home for various reasons. We now need to build a stronger culture of engagement and collaboration and the more employees we get into the office the better company we will be.” Just as Yahoo, HP also felt the need to bring all the employees together on a common platform and put more emphasis on employee’s interactions to bring innovation wave in the company.............
Looking Ahead
After the ban on work from home decision of Yahoo, experts started debating on many important questions that the company would face in the near future which includes,will this decision prove to be a turning point towards the creation of healthy working environment in Yahoo? ................
Assignment Questions
I. What is the central issue of the case?
II. What does ‘work from home’ mean?
III. Is working from home good or bad?
IV. .....................
Exhibits
Exhibit I: CEOs of Yahoo
Exhibit II: Movement of Yahoo’s Share Price from January 2006 to January 2013
Exhibit III: Jackie Reses Mail on “Ban on Work from Home”
